David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> skribis:

> I stated quite definitely that I am perfectly capable of dealing with
> the mess GUILE made of string ports.

Good to know, this was not my understanding until now.

The intent of the change in 2.2 is to hide the very fact that string
ports “have an encoding.”  So from that viewpoint, that bug is closed.

If the bug is about ‘ftell’, that’s a different story.  I would tend to
suggest that ‘ftell’ and ‘seek’ for string ports operate on an abstract
notion of position within the string port data.

This is in fact the path that the R6RS takes:

  For a binary port, the port-position procedure returns the index of
  the position at which the next byte would be read from or written to
  the port as an exact non-negative integer object.  For a textual port,
  port-position returns a value of some implementation-dependent type
  representing the port's position; this value may be useful only as the
  pos argument to set-port-position!, if the latter is supported on the
  port (see below).

Thus, I would suggest a clarification along these lines: